Lian Li Industrial Co. Ltd. launches the PC-8FI mid tower series. The hair-line brushed all-aluminum chassis is positively sexy and available in a red spider-edition, as well as black and silver, taking looks to a new level. Lian Li's signature tool-less installation features and customization capabilities make the PC-8FI series a must have for the gaming enthusiasts and professional gamers.

The same fan design is used for all three models with two 120mm @1200rpm intake fans on the front panel and one 120mm @1200rpm exhaust fan mounted on the back panel. All the fans have anti-vibration mountings. Additionally, the top panel offers users one 140mm fan hole, should they desire to mount an additional fan. The red spider-edition's side panel features a large, spider-shaped, transparent window, exposing the interior of the chassis and the rear panel's exhaust fan, lit with red LEDs. On the black edition's front panel, the intake fans are lit with blue LEDs.

The MSI Big Bang-XPower is making its much anticipated debut in April of this year. MSI, a leading mainboard and graphics card maker, with over 23 years of R&D and manufacturing experience, has made its name catering to performance-hungry gamers. The Big Bang-XPower is another exceptional mainboard from the Big Bang series with astonishing performance and reliability. MSI is confident that the Big Bang-XPower will again be selling like hotcakes to users worldwide.

MSI’s Big Bang-XPower mainboard is built with Military Class components that includes a Hi-c CAP (highly-conductive polymerized capacitor), Solid Cap (solid capacitor), and Icy Choke for longer lifespan, better thermal reliability, and stability. The Hi-c CAP has excellent physical properties of thermally stable, reliable, performs under stress, and lasts 8X longer than traditional solid capacitors. Icy Choke is a new generation ferrite choke that features low temperature and longer lifespan. Military Class Solid CAP lasts longer than traditional capacitors, up to 10 years of lifespan. All these Military Class components add up to a stable and long lasting mainboard that will keep running even under high stress conditions.

NVIDIA released its latest version of the GeForce driver suite, version 197.55, specific to the GeForce GTX 400 series graphics cards. The WHQL-signed drivers don't announce any more changes than a major feature change - official support for 4-way SLI on both GeForce GTX 480 and GeForce GTX 470. The drivers only work with GeForce 400 series products. No Release Notes documents were published along with the drivers.

Soon after EVGA laid its hands on stocks of GeForce GTX 480 graphics cards, it claims from an internal test that 4-way SLI is possible on the reference design GTX 480 graphics cards. The GTX 480 was advertised to work with up to two more of its kind in 3-way SLI, in NVIDIA's presentations to the press. EVGA's feat of running four GTX 480 cards was possible on its X58 Classified 4-way SLI motherboard, which has room for four graphics cards, and a special SLI bridge that connects to four NVIDIA graphics cards with two SLI interconnect bridges each. EVGA released a special-edition GeForce GTX 285 4-way SLI ready graphics card to go with the motherboard.

The EVGA X58 Classified 4-way SLI isn't the only motherboard to support 4-way SLI, the recently released EVGA Classified SR2 also ships with the special SLI bridge. No other motherboard vendor released a 4-way bridge, yet. EVGA demonstrated the 4-way SLI setup with a run of Unigine Heaven, although it did not give away any performance numbers. 4-way SLI is not to be confused with Quad-SLI, which is also a four-GPU SLI configuration, but involves a 2-way SLI connection between two dual-GPU graphics cards (such as GeForce 9800 GX2, GTX 295, MARS). Any SLI-supportive motherboard supports Quad-SLI.

ASUS today announced the launch of the new ASUS P7F7-E WS SuperComputer motherboard which maximizes transmission speeds by integrating the industry's latest I/O technologies such as USB 3.0, SATA 6G storage interface, and IEEE 1394b FireWire standard. Additionally, the ASUS P7F7-E WS SuperComputer is equipped with the LGA1156 socket and the latest Intel 3450 chipset with onboard graphics. For extreme gaming enjoyment, up to four ATI CrossFireX cards or 3-way/2-way NVIDIA SLI cards can be accommodated to generate smoother and sharper visuals. It also leverages NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture to support up to four NVIDIA Tesla cards with Clarkdale Processors for intensive high-performance computing.

Czech technology website PCTuning confirmed a few details about NVIDIA's upcoming performance graphics accelerator, the GeForce GTX 470. It was found out that a beta driver by NVIDIA, GeForce 196.78 supports GeForce 400 series accelerators, and was able run a qualification sample of GeForce GTX 470. The card was using A3 revision GF100 silicon. The driver's System Information dialog revealed that the card indeed has 448 CUDA cores (SIMD units). Further, it has 1280 MB of memory, and a 320-bit wide memory interface. NVIDIA also changed the way it represents memory clock speeds. Since it is using GDDR5 memory, while the memory has an actual clock speed of 1000 MHz, the data rate (DDR speed) is represented first, as 2000 MHz, and "effective speed" next, which is 4000 MHz.

Given these speeds, at 1000 MHz GDDR5, the GPU has a memory bandwidth of 160 GB/s. Without compromise on looks and quality, NVIDIA kept the cooler design basic. It has a matte finish. Display outputs include two DVI-D, and one mini HDMI. It supports NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround (a technology competitive to ATI Eyefinity, to span a display head across multiple physical displays), just that NVIDIA requires at least two accelerators in SLI to use it. NVIDIA's GeForce 400 series graphics accelerators will be launched on the 26th of this month.

EVGA made public its 25th release of the EVGA SLI Enhancement (version 02.25.10), a software patch that adds SLI profiles to NVIDIA's GeForce display drivers. SLI profiles are application-specific bits of software that optimise it to make use of multiple NVIDIA GPUs. The new release is based on NVIDIA GeForce 196.21 driver, and adds SLI optimisations for the following games:

Supreme Commander 2 Demo

Aliens vs. Predator, in all DirectX Modes

Mass Effect 2

Zombie Driver

Registered EVGA users (registration is free) can get the SLI Enhancement patch from here.

Lian Li Industrial Co. Ltd Ltd today has launched the PC-A77F Full Tower chassis ideal for PC power users and server systems. Incorporating USB 3.0 functionality with 4x new USB 3.0 ports as well as the standard e-SATA x1 and HD+AC97 Audio. The hair-line brushed all black aluminum chassis features three Blue LED fans on the front (3x 120mm@1200RPM), and 2x Top 140mm fans @1000RPM, as well as 1x 120mm rear fan (1500RPM). The 8x PCI expansion slots enable CrossFireX and three way SLI graphic card setups. The chassis front panel clips off conveniently as needed. The inlet fans have filters that are washable. The entire chassis is designed for tool-less implementation, so installing your hardware a nd getting your system up and running is extremely quick and easy. The dimensions stand at 220mm x 572mm x 590mm (W, H, D) for the PC-A77F.

The Lian Li patented Power Supply Bracket which allows the PSU to be secured using only the tool-less clasp is very useful to hold the PSU without the need for securing screws. The 9x internal HDD 3.5” bays have a tool-less bracket mounting system where the HDD’s are secured along secure rails. The rails lock fast to ensure all HDD’s are held in place with rubber grommet struts to prevent movement and vibration from today’s fast moving and highly specialized HDD components. The locking mechanism slides into place and secures all the HDD’s simultaneously. The PCI securing brackets are made of aluminum and have a special tool-less clip with rubber padding to secure your graphics and daughter cards with the utmost of ease. The front panel and top panel are easily detachable for access to fans and air filters. The PC-A77F chassis have all the functional and user friendly design aspects users have come to expect in high quality Lian Li cases.

Whereas NVIDIA is inching towards releasing its DirectX compliant GF100 GPU from which it has high expectations, some of its partners don't seem to give up on the two-generation old G92. Galaxy has almost finished designing a graphics card that uses two GeForce GTS 250 GPUs on one PCB, in an SLI on card setup. It refers to the card as "DualCore GTS250", and consists of a long blue PCB which holds two G92-426 GPUs (G92-426 GPUs are used on low-power variants of the GTS 250).

Each GPU is wired to 1 GB of GDDR3 memory across its 256-bit wide memory interface (total 2 GB on board). The two GPUs are connected to the system over an nForce 200 BR-03 bridge chip. The multi-GPU system is contained within the board, with no SLI fingers for expansion, even though G92 chips are Quad SLI capable.

EVGA finished its twentieth release of the EVGA SLI Enhancement Patch, a software that adds to the GeForce system drivers' SLI profiles specific to applications. These SLI profiles help applications take advantage of multiple GeForce graphics cards in SLI, or dual-GPU GeForce accelerators such as the GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce GTX 295. Version 20 (01.15.10) adds SLI profiles to Dark Void, Serious Sam HD, and Avatar (Demo). This patch is based on GeForce drivers 195.81. The latest version of GeForce drivers from NVIDIA bring SLI profiles to the latter two games. Registered EVGA users can download the software from here.